capable of millions of read and write transactions per second. Oracle’s cloud networking services are

not over-subscribed, so each tenant gets predictable high-performance and low latency. Based on third-party testing. In a White paper published by Oracle entitled: ‘Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Platform Overview’ it reported that Oracle and its affiliates offer 2-5 the I/O performance of comparable on-premises or AWS products, with consistent low latency, low jitter and higher bandwidth. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is designed

for applications that require consistent performance, including raw processing through CPUs or GPUs, millions of storage IOPS, high throughput, and low latency. Performance translates into faster results and greater productivity for end-users. The platform also uses a ‘zero-trust

Oracle Cloud supports aims to support all legacy workloads while delivering modern cloud development tools. Our Generation 2 Cloud is built to run Oracle Autonomous Database, the industry’s first and only self-driving database. Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive

architecture’. This means that not only are tenants isolated from one another, but tenants are also isolated from Oracle and vice versa. Above Oracle Cloud’s core infrastructure are layer upon layer of defenses including encryption everywhere, least-privilege identity and access management, and granular resource and network control all the way out to the edge. Oracle Cloud also uses a strict code security development and deployment processes, a full compliance team that is constantly auditing new regions and services, and a round-the- clock Security Operations Center to guard against threats. Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure is a

natural fit for many high-performance and I/O intensive computing workloads due to this focus on HPC hardware, enabling workloads such as product simulations, risk modelling, and digital twin design and development. These workloads involve huge data sets that need to be analysed using large-scale compute jobs, which demand high performance, high throughput, and low variability. Typical multi-tenant clouds have hypervisor overhead and performance variability. With Oracle’s single tenant model, there is no overhead.

Using the cloud also removes the

long provisioning cycle for acquiring and setting up an HPC cluster in an on- premises environment. Using the cloud researchers can spin up powerful HPC instances in minutes. Moreover, bare- metal instances come with 25 Gbps network throughput, which helps move massive amounts of data quickly. Oracle also offers HPC-specific instances with higher clock speeds and RDMA-based cluster networking. This provides even higher bandwidth (100 Gbps) and even lower latency (1.5 µs) for HPC workloads that rely on MPI (message passing interface). ‘All of this is being done on bare metal

compute behind the scenes’ adds Newill. ‘We scale up and have much different computing requirements than running a web server. This bare metal approach is very important to the simulations and workloads we run in the research space,’ noted Newill. ‘My responsibility since I joined Oracle has been to build out the hardware for research and these types of workloads,’ added Newill. Oracle researchers with HPC

requirements can access the latest Intel and AMD processors, GPUs from Nvidia based on Pascal and Volta architectures and a high speed RDMA backend which provides the networking resources required by HPC workloads. ‘At the end of the day my responsibility

is to make sure that researchers around the world have access to the highest performing hardware in the cloud,’ Newill concluded.

Each of the individual research projects

covered in the Oracle webcast will be highlighted in an upcoming series of articles on Scientific Computing World. Over the next month you can see how these researchers are using cloud to deliver scientific progress and drive their respective fields forward.

If you would like more information regarding this topic or to view the researchers presentations in full the webcast is now available on the Scientific Computing Website to be viewed at anytime. www.scientific-computing.com/webcasts